“Rank Stranger,” also known as “Rank Strangers” and “Rank Strangers to Me,” was written by Albert E. Brumley, the Oklahoma-born gospel songwriter whose other songs include “I’ll Fly Away,” “Turn Your Radio On” and “I’ll Meet You in the Morning.” Brumley entered a copyright notice for it in 1942, when he was a staff writer for the Stamps-Baxter Music Company in Dallas, and later recordings still credit the publisher as Stamps-Baxter Music.
The singer goes back to the mountain home where he was happy and free in his youth and looks for his friends, but cannot find a single one. In the chorus, which is built to be sung with echoing answers, he says everyone he meets is a rank stranger: no mother or father, no friend, no one who knows his name or whose face he knows. In the last verse a stranger’s voice tells him they have all moved away to a beautiful home by the crystal sea, and he looks forward to meeting them in heaven, where no one will be a stranger to him.
The Stanley Brothers learned it from the radio. Ralph Stanley later recalled that in the 1950s he and Carter, driving to a show, heard the Willow Branch Quartet, a gospel group from around Bristol, singing it on a Sunday-morning broadcast. They had never heard the phrase “rank stranger” before. The brothers worked out an arrangement of their own in which Ralph’s tenor enters alone at the start of the chorus, which he said was meant to be “like somebody surprising you from behind.”
They recorded it for Starday in May or June 1960 at Magnum Studio in Jacksonville, Florida, with Carter singing lead and playing guitar, Ralph singing tenor and playing banjo, Curley Lambert singing baritone and playing mandolin, Ralph Mayo on lead guitar and Audie Webster on bass. Starday released it as a single, backed with “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet” (Starday 506), in August 1960. Billboard reviewed it that month as a side about returning home to find only strangers there, and it appeared that autumn on the LP Sacred Songs from the Hills. Ralph Stanley said it became the most popular song the Stanley Brothers ever sang. The Library of Congress added the recording to the National Recording Registry in 2009.
After Carter’s death in 1966, Ralph kept it in his shows; Roy Lee Centers sang it with the Clinch Mountain Boys in Tokyo on 5 May 1971. Doc Watson, Clint Howard and Fred Price performed it at a 1967 concert issued by Vanguard as Old Timey Concert (1977), with Price singing, and Carl Story recorded it in Nashville in November 1962. The Osborne Brothers cut it as “Rank Strangers” in 1978 at Hilltop Studios in Nashville, Bob Dylan recorded it as “Rank Strangers to Me” for Down in the Groove (1988), and Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder included it on Bluegrass Rules! (Rounder, 1997), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.
